marinegirl

Just had a fantastic couple of days doing some surveys at Apo Island. Apo is famous (at least in the marine reserves crowd!) as the big success story of marine conservation in the Philippines. The marine sanctuary was established (by Dr Alcala, of my PhD supervisors) in 1982, and, unlike many reserves here, has a great record of enforcement. The reserve has had an amazingly positive impact on the island, increasing the numbers and size of fish (and consequently the income of fishermen) and bringing divers and tourists to the island. Now the barangay captain is a dive instructor at the resort!

I took JJ and Chloe along as my dive buddies / research assistants - they’re from the UK and are volunteering / working their way around the world. At the moment they’re staying in Dumaguete and helping out various people at the marine lab. It was nice for me to hear some English accents for a change (apparently I’m losing mine!) and I think it was nice for them to have a break from sorting sediment samples!

The diving at Apo is always fab, and yesterday it was like turtle soup - we saw seven turtles on one dive! I kept almost swimming into them while I was preoccupied counting my fish, and one let me get so close I could have reached out and touched his flipper quite easily. We had a few communication issues with our boatmen - they couldn’t understand why I needed to do all the dives at the same site, and kept suggesting that we would like to see different sites around the island - but in the end I managed to get everything done that I needed to.

I only needed to do two dives each day, which left plenty of time for pigging out on yummy food at the resort, and exploring the island. It’s a lovely place to walk around and chat to people - everyone is really friendly and wants to stop and chat. We ended up talking to a lady about her pigs - they live by the edge of the lagoon, and apparently their pens got flooded last week in the typhoon, but its ok because they can swim. They’re all going to be killed for the fiesta on April 4. The kids have a whole olympics of games you can play with a pair of flipflops and loved posing for photos and then laughing at each other on the screens of our digital cameras. They surrounded us on the beach at sunset laughing and calling us ‘alien’. And I thought I was getting a tan! We also fell victim to the infamous ‘T-shirt ladies’ who insisted I try on t-shirt after t-shirt until we found one in the right size, colour and design.

We stayed at Liberty’s resort, in the cheapest rooms, which personally I think are the nicest! They have nipa walls and bamboo beds with mosquito nets, and open onto little balconies which have an amazing view of the sunset. There’s no running water on the island, and the only electricity is from a generator which os on for a few hours a day, so at night it’s beautifully dark and quiet. All of us wished we could afford to stay another few nights (or weeks!) and didn’t want to go back to the city. We delayed out return as long as possible, and booked a boat back to Malatapay at 3pm. By this time the wind had really picked up, and what is usually a half hour relaxing boat trip became an hour-long white water ride! The waves were considerably bigger than our little pump boat, but it was great fun. I finished up the strenuous work day with an hours massage at Urban Nirvana, mmmmmmm.